Tuesday at Jfokus 2013 started in a large auditorium filled with more than 1500 Jfokus attendees, who heard Jfokus founder Mattias Karlsson launch the conference in an introduction that included an appearance by Stephen Chin, who had spent the previous night sailing the icy Baltic Ocean...

Tuesday at Jfokus 2013[2] started in a large auditorium filled with more than 1500 Jfokus attendees, who heard Jfokus founder Mattias Karlsson[3] launch the conference in an introduction that included an appearance by Stephen Chin[4], who had spent the previous night sailing the icy Baltic Ocean on the Vaadin Cruise[5] from Finland. The conversation also introduced a new Java Champion, JRuby's Charles Nutter[6]!

After the intro, there were keynote addresses. Actually, getting more than 1500 developers seated in the large auditorium took so long that by the time the conference introduction session concluded, the keynote session for the first Jfokus Embedded[7] track was well underway. I will write details of this and all the sessions I attended in the coming weeks. For now, I'll briefly summarize what I attended and saw today.

The portion of the Jfokus Embedded 2013 keynote I attended featured Henrik Ståhl, with demos and additional discussion by Gemalto's Axel Hansmann, who talked about embedded technology's capability to protect against illegal deforestation of Amazon forests, among other topics. Sharat Chander also spoke.

In the Exhibition Hall, I stopped by at the Eclipse booth and chatted with Marcel Bruch about the Eclipse Code Recommenders[8] project. More to come about that in a later Java.net blog...

I returned to the Jfokus Embedded track, attending Christer Norström's session "Internet of Sports (or How to win GOLD medals in the next Olympics)." This made me feel right at home, since almost all of my career has involved developing software for systems that collect data from sensors, visualize the data, analyze the data, apply models to it, try to develop new or improved models... Yep, Christer, his team, the Swedish Olympic Committee, and other organizations are trying to apply the "Internet of Things" (IoT) to win Olympic gold medals!

In the afternoon, Java.net assistant editor Dale Farnham and I caught an ending snippet of Noam Tenne's session "How we took our server-side application to the Cloud and liked what we got" ("we" being JFrog[9]).

Next we attended our sort of "home" session, the "Java.net Community Update" by Community Manager Sonya Barry, who discussed the history of the site, the latest new features and innovations, and plans for the future. Sonya invited people to contact her directly if they are interested in participating in the Java.net community and have questions regarding how to do this.

We returned to the Jfokus Embedded track for Benjamin Cabé's session "Eclipse M2M: Open Source building blocks for the Internet of Things," which focused on the lightweight language Lua and various tools that will facilitate development of machine-to-machine data acquisition and control systems (at least, that's what we called it circa 1980) being worked on by the Eclipse Foundation. Now we have terms like "subscribe and publish" -- but, how different is that, really?

Next was a session by Geertjan Wielenga and Henry Aurosell titled "Strategies for Loose Coupling in Large Desktop Applications." This focused on the advantages of utilizing the NetBeans Platform[10] as a starting point for developing rich and flexible desktop applications.

Free beer, wine, soda, and buffet food provided by Jfokus 2013 sponsor Atlassian[11] followed. During this break, we finally met Arun Gupta[12] in person (after years of various online communications and occasionally seeing him from a distance). We also met Andrzej Grzesik, who talked about Java in Poland and the geecon Conference[13], which will be held in Krakow in May.

Finally, we sat in for a while on some Bird-of-a-Feather sessions, including Markus Eisele and Mike Keith's "Java EE.express BOF," Stephen Chin's "Raspberry Pi NightHacking BOF," and Heather VanCura and Martijn Verburg's "OpenJDK, JCP and Adopt OpenJDK/JSR Community BOF."

Now, we look forward to one more day of Jfokus 2013. We plan to spent most of the day on the Jfokus Embedded 2013 track.